Talk Title: Designing Between Humans and Nature: Bridging Intent and Performance with AI

Abstract:

Design mediates the relationship between humans and nature. In the built environment, engineering decisions about form, structure, and material shape how people inhabit space and how natural systems are engaged, preserved, or transformed. Today, the environmental impact of construction is one of the defining challenges of our time. Buildings account for nearly forty percent of global carbon emissions, much of it embedded in materials and construction. This positions design as a powerful lever for shaping environmental outcomes. When performance is treated as a creative framework rather than a constraint, design can contribute to decarbonization while expanding the possibilities of architectural expression.

This talk presents a research and teaching program that advances design as a mode of engineering inquiry. Emerging computational, artificial intelligence, and fabrication tools are integrated directly into design workflows so that human intent, engineering performance, and material constraints can be considered simultaneously. Generative and multi-objective methods enable designers to explore trade-offs among structural efficiency, spatial quality, and environmental impact. Multimodal AI systems interpret sketches, language, and qualitative goals, translating them into alternatives grounded in physics-based analysis. Interactive interfaces connect geometric exploration with real-time performance feedback, reshaping the relationship between creative reasoning and engineering evaluation.

The work extends beyond digital models into physical realization. Robotic assembly, low-carbon concrete geometries, and algorithmic reuse of salvaged materials demonstrate how computational design can operate within real supply chains, new policy landscapes, and evolving construction economics. Across scales from material components to building and urban systems, these projects suggest that responding to the climate crisis is not only a technical challenge but a design opportunity. By integrating human creativity, engineering rigor, and material intelligence, design becomes a means of negotiating the future of the built environment in balance with natural systems.

Bio:

Caitlin Mueller is an Associate Professor at MIT with appointments in Architecture and Civil and Environmental Engineering. She leads the Digital Structures research group, directs the Building Technology program, and serves as Associate Director of the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium. Trained at MIT and Stanford in architecture, structural engineering, computation, and building technology, she joined the MIT faculty in 2014.

Her research advances computational design and digital fabrication methods that integrate engineering performance, material systems, and artificial intelligence to shape innovative, high-performing buildings and structures. Across research and teaching, she develops design approaches that connect structural efficiency, sustainability, and expressive form.

Her work has received major recognition, including the ACADIA Innovative Research Award of Excellence, the ACSA Diversity Achievement Award, seven best paper awards, and Architectural Record’s inaugural Innovator of the Year distinction in 2025. She has published more than 150 peer-reviewed papers, and her research has been realized in built projects including the Sueños con Tierra y Concreto pavilion (Mexico City, 2022), four installations at the 2025 Venice Biennale, and Janet Echelman’s Remembering the Future sculpture at the MIT Museum (2025). She is co-founder of Forma Systems and Pixelframe, startups translating computational and circular structural design research into practice.